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ONE MONTH LATER
MARGO'S pen scribbled across a piece of paper in one of her spare notebooks. She sighed, thinking over the sentence before ripping the page out and throwing it on the ground. Just below her bed sat a pile of crumpled paper, all in different shapes from the way her hands crushed the sheet. She started on a new page and wrote, Valedictorian Speech, at the top for the twentieth time.
My aunt used to tell me that we have an endless amount of opportunities, she scribbled out. Her ink spat blotches on the paper, and when Margo brushed it away with her finger, the ink smeared. She tried to ignore it.
"You have such a long life," she said. "You will be given so many opportunities, so take them." No matter what, I've always tried to take every opportunity handed to me, but these things can also come with mistakes. I know for us as teenagers that we never want to make mistakes, but once we leave this gymnasium with a degree in our hands, it will be the time to make them.
Margo's hand stopped. She read over her words once again and sighed dramatically. She hit her head against a pillow. Nothing felt like it sounded right, and she had a million other things clouding her brain. She needed to finish this speech for graduation, which was coming up in a month. She needed to begin packing and thinking about everything she needed for USCF. Oh, and she also needed to tell her werewolf boyfriend that she'd be leaving. Just a couple of first world problems.
Margo looked to her laptop, which was open on her bed. She had been browsing the University of San Francisco's website and looking more into the professors in the teaching program.
She hadn't thought about them in a long time, but Margo found herself reminiscing on her parents. They weren't good people, and she didn't need the stress of thinking about them in the first place, but she couldn't help herself. She wondered if they would be proud of her, finally, for getting into the school of her dreams, or finding a place she truly called home.
Margo wanted to believe that there was one good bone in their bodies, but her memories of them overruled that idea. They didn't want her if she was anything less from perfect. Regardless if she got into her dream college, they would've probably said the school was nothing compared to Harvard or Yale.
Why couldn't they have just been normal parents, who didn't want everything from her and didn't fight every second of the day? Margo could figure out most things, but this thought didn't cease to make her mind boggle. She wished they had loved her enough to let her be herself. She wished they could've been proud of her, at least once.
She was still surprised that she told Jacob about them, even if she blurted it out of anger. Margo had never felt comfortable talking about her parents, except maybe with Jenny, on occasion. She had never told Melinda. When Melinda asked one day why she didn't live with her parents, Margo told her that she didn't want to talk about it. "I just had to leave California," was her excuse, and Melinda accepted this. Margo was lucky to have someone like her. Maybe she'd tell her later on. She expected them to be friends long after high school.
